My development within this expertise area mainly comes from extracurricular activities. To start, I am currently co-owner of the web design startup Scrollmate. I started out as an employee, gaining experience in what it was like to take part in such an undertaking. I used the web design skills that I learned to also get a client on my own on the side and when the previous owners decided to stop, my brother and I took over the venture. In my current role, I am involved in interacting with (potential) clients, tailoring our service to their needs, as well as determining prices, and balancing our expenses.

This experience made me believe that I could put the ambition that I always had in my projects to practice myself. It drove me to get involved in the TU/e Contest to find out what my vision on sustainability could mean in an entrepreneurial context. Together with fellow Industrial Design student, and a good friend of mine, Tobias Visch, we embarked on this journey starting from a shared desire to increase biodiversity in our cities. With the project, under the name EDEN, we started building a diverse team with a student from Landscape Design at the HAS, an IT student from the HAN, and an Industrial Engineering student from the TU/e. Our aim was to build a service that helps people bring and maintain the right plants in their gardens for the local ecosystems.

Towards this aim, we took note from the business expertise within the TU/e Contest environment, as well as seeking for content-related expertise from external stakeholders. With the extracurricular internship I had done at Van Eijk & Van der Lubbe I had already gained experience with collecting interests and opinions from stakeholders, where we worked on the concept Third Office (see figure). We had to discuss how employees could be working closer to home with organizations such as Rabobank, Rijkswaterstaat and Province of Brabant, however I had no leading role in these meetings. With EDEN, where the initiative in stakeholder meetings was with me, I gained much confidence in engaging and interacting with stakeholders as we sat down with established organizations such as Coen Hagedoorn, Soontiëns, the Municipality of Eindhoven, Brabant Water, and Stichting Steenbreek. On the Contest side, we followed workshops on entrepreneurship, had to pitch on fairs, and needed to deliver substantiating documents like pitch deck slides. Here for, the course Design Innovation Methods came at the right time by bringing in knowledge and tools on market positioning. In this, we got through the selection rounds and as TU/e Contest finalist we won the Mikrocentrum Boost Your Tech Career Award. Wrapping up the contest, we got involved with the regional start-up helpdesk The Gate and also enrolled in the Startup Readiness Program they offered.

Figure: Presenting the Third Office concept at Rijkswaterstaat

This journey brought me many things, but most of all perspective on what this expertise area could mean for me. I started to understand that being entrepreneurial is far from only big business and money making, it is about seeing opportunities, understanding contexts, taking action, balancing resources and making impact. Value creation in the broadest sense of the word, and therefore highly compatible with my vision. This new attitude and knowledge helped me tremendously throughout my Final Bachelor Project, where I started from scratch and was able to engage on my own with a vast number of stakeholders and eventually even managed to bring in a collaboration with corporation ‘thuis. These interactions have been essential in understanding the complex system of greenery in our cities and working towards a real-life solution. Just as important has been my new found understanding of efficiency, where I had to deal with some personal setbacks in this FBP semester, I was able to see the resources at hand, including myself, and find ways to effectively handle this project.

When considering my reasoning to follow this bachelor, the part of being creative is what really got me, as probably accounts for many ID students. To be fair, the extent to which I thought this would be about ‘designing’ in a sense of sketching was not how it showed to be. Nevertheless, the hard skills that I learned like design sketching and cardboard prototyping in the courses Exploratory Sketching and Exploratory Making gave me important tools to convey my ideas. Especially sketching is something that allowed me to discuss my ideas with stakeholders and potential users in my Final Bachelor Project. Also, the visual media skills that I purposely build by taking responsibility for videos, photos and graphics during the variety of projects, for example with Project 2 and Project 3, gave me a professional identity where I have the ability to present results in a convincing way.

Figure: A sketch from the course Exploratory Sketching

However, just as important is the creative mindset that I have developed, specifically in light of my vision on sustainable transformation that can be like a puzzle with complex proportions and thus requires out-of-the-box thinking. Here, I developed by for example the brainstorming and full body ideation techniques I learned from the course From Idea to Design, the activities I did such as doodling and crazy 8s during the DDW design sprint as well as squad workshops on for instance rapid prototyping. Furthermore, the knowledge that I got to work with during Aesthetics of Interaction gave me new perspectives on the nuances within our person-product interactions. For example, the Extreme Characters method (Djajadiningrat et al., 2000) enhanced my understanding of the richness interactions can have in terms of their socio-cultural role, where the Frogger framework (Wensveen et al., 2004) made me aware of the information that products present and how this information is coupled with our actions. This knowledge I could use in my projects, such as in my Final Bachelor Project, where I used my awareness of inherent feedforward to design partly transparent pieces that indicate the action possibility of overlapping the pieces.

References:
Djajadiningrat, J. P., Gaver, W. W., & Frens, J. W. (2000). Interaction Relabelling and extreme characters : Methods for exploring aesthetic interactions. In Proceedings of Designing Interative Systems (DIS2000) (pp. 66-71). Association for Computing Machinery, Inc. https://doi.org/10.1145/347642.347664
Wensveen, Stephan & Djajadiningrat, J. & Overbeeke, Kees. (2004). Interaction frogger: A design framework to couple action and function through feedback and feedforward. DIS2004 - Designing Interactive Systems

Throughout the years I have started to enjoy the realm of possibilities that computing power provides us with. I started out with no experience at all of anything related to computers, so when making a little game in Arduino and Processing for Creative Programming, analysing a dataset using Python in Data Analytics for Engineers, or using some CSS in making parts of websites at Scrollmate, it always felt a bit magical to me.

Apart from this magic wand that I got to experience, I have mainly started to see how operating from this sense of logic and structure that comes with this expertise area can be extremely beneficial in many cases. It can play an important part in organizing study results, finding relevant scoping areas, and understanding how to set up a data collection process. This last point I mainly learned with the course Making Sense of Sensors, where we set up our own data collection station that allowed us to get insights into our sleeping habits related to different environmental factors. This ability to monitor and understand data about our environments is also one that already plays an important role towards sustainability, partly because it allows the lesser voices, like nature, to tell their story. This formed the base for a concept my friends and I participated with in the Lucid Design Challenge of Heijmans for biodiversity on the TU/e campus.

Figure: The designed system for the TU/e campus

Additionally, with EDEN, the core idea was built on using input data from users to generate a specific recommendation of plants that would benefit their local environment. For this, we had to gather a database of native plants through our stakeholder engagement, as discussed in Businness and Entrepeneurship, and use this in our website tool to translate the user input to tailored output.

In line with this, but also considering my vision on bridging top and bottom levels, made me think of ways to translate the more qualitative desires from residents into usable outcomes, which I deemed necessary in order to make something happen on the system side of things. This resulted in my Final Bachelor Project using Python to analyse the different garden layouts residents envisioned and giving data insights that can signal a certain relevance towards the housing corporation.

In the extension of the magic wand, as I discuss in Math, Data & Computing, is integrating this smartness into prototypes in order to create these interactive experiences. Throughout my development this mainly revolved around using Arduino code to understand sensors and control actuators. This process also requires to understand some electrical engineering in terms of data sheets, circuit diagrams and calculations.  With physics in my high school I had some theoretical background, however I learned to work on this in practice during Creative Programming, Creative Electronics, Engineering Design and Making Sense of Sensors.

I applied and sharpened these skills throughout a number of additional projects and courses. I took responsibility for the electronics in Project 1 and Project 3. In my Project 2 I had an important role in making a working vending machine that allowed adolescents to get their needed nutrition. In the course Designing for Vitality in a Real-life Setting we designed and worked out this interactive system that motivates people in their activities in the public space. Towards my Final Bachelor Project I decided to work with a different language, Python, but still took this understanding of realizing an interactive experience for users on my Demo-day. Here, they could see the computer program tracking the coloured pieces they placed on the board.

Figure: The final prototypes for Project 3

A big part of a successful interactive experience also lies in the robustness and quality of the physical prototype. This more external part of the prototypes is something I mostly developed during Project 2 and Project 3, where I developed skills in laser cutting and working with wood and fabric. In the course Engineering Design I got some experience with using 3D printed objects to case the electronics. During my Final Bachelor Project I used the previously gained experience I had with wood, and added the use of plastic and magnetic materials.

In the EDEN project that I undertook we became part of this diverse community of engineers in the TU/e Contest, as well as establish our own team. This gave me the opportunity to combine my understanding on engineering and communicative skills towards building and presenting our own concept, as well as questioning others. In my Final Bachelor Project I also applied these skills in the interactions I had with a teacher researcher at the Fontys ICT department where we discussed my project and it brought me confirmation towards analysing the resident inputs into heatmaps. In this experience, I also brought in some directions for data analysis towards an assignment for her students.

In high-school, my only experience with project processes came from projects or practicals in courses like biology, chemics and physics, these were often linear. During my development the past years I have got to know how many processes, especially in design, are non-linear, but rather iterative and meandering. Over the years I experienced doing research or going through a design process in different forms. During the DDW Project (see figure) we did a design sprint, in the course Design research and Project 3 I got experience with research through design, and in my Minor in Sustainability I worked with action research and also learned about scientific paradigms such as positivism, constructivism and critical realism (Sobh & Perry, 2006).

Figure: DDW Design sprint location

In my Final Bachelor Project, I used Human-Centered Systems Thinking (IDEO, n.d.) as inspiration to find the right areas to focus on by using a more holistic as well as a human point of view, necessary for the complexity that greenery in our cities brings. This allowed me to move from a city level to the specifics of an apartment building in Woensel Zuid. Besides that, throughout my reflections over the years I had noticed myself often thinking too much, rather than also doing. The result-oriented attitude that comes with Human-Centered Systems Thinking has forced me to combine my analytical abilities with the creative methods that I have learned during this study.

References:
IDEO. (n.d.). How to Think in Systems for Greater Impact. IDEO U. https://www.ideou.com/blogs/inspiration/how-to-think-in-systems-for-greater-impact
Sobh, Rana & Perry, Chad. (2006). Research design and data analysis in realism research. European Journal of Marketing. 40. 10.1108/03090560610702777.